Nowadays, thanks to the advancement of transportation and technology, the world has become more and more globalized and competitive. In order to survive the fierce competition, the companies today modify their organizational structures into flatter types with fewer hierarchical levels. In this case, the companies can reduce the time needed to communicate among hierarchical levels to respond to the rapid changing market quickly. This phenomenon happened quite commonly in recent Taiwan society. Because of some natural constrains such as the population and industry types, most companies in Taiwan are small and medium enterprises (SMEs). According to the statistics from Ministry of Economic Affair in Taiwan, around 97.6% of the companies are SMEs and approximately 78.2% of the entire population in Taiwan works in SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2016). SMEs are defined as companies with less than 100 employees (200 employees for manufacture and mining industry). With these few employees in the company, the organization structures tend to have fewer ranks and often look flatter. As a result, employees’ mobility toward the upper level will be more difficult and more competitive with the few ranks existing in the companies.
This brings out the issue of career plateau, which originally refers to an individual staying at the same position without moving to a higher rank in an organization.
When it was first discussed, career plateau talks only about the vertical and horizontal mobility within the organization. However, Veiga (1981) suggested that there is possibility that employees received upward movement without actually earning more salary, facing extra or different job contents as well as challenges. The study indicated that simply judging whether an employee is plateaued or not through
evaluating his/her chances of getting a promotion is not sufficient. Therefore, the previous studies developed the construct of career plateau with two dimensions: job content plateau and hierarchical plateau (Bardwick, 1986; Feldman & Weitz, 1988).
Career plateau is a situation that every employee will naturally encounter sooner or later in their career life. It does not necessarily lead to bad consequences.
Research showed that plateaued employees constantly provide positive support to the companies (Bardwick, 1986). However, generally, negative results were found in studies. Job dissatisfaction, low engagement and commitment and even worse the high turnover rate of employees might harm the companies badly (Feldman & Weitz, 1988). Often when employees are stocked at the same position too long, they are not able to receive more payment or new job tasks. Doing routine works makes employees feel bored, which results in the dissatisfaction toward the jobs and maybe even the companies. Later on they may be reluctant to dedicate themselves to the company and the performance start to deteriorate. If the situation becomes worse, misbehaviors like absenteeism will start happening. Eventually, employees may consider or actually leave the company, which is called employee turnover (Chao, 1990; Milliman, 1992).
For a human resource practitioner, the employee turnover rate of a company needs to be monitored constantly. Turnover does not always come with bad consequences. Positively, it prevents companies from aging and improves the overall performance of companies as well (Staw, 1980). However, a turnover rate too high will definitely do harm to the company. The company might end up wasting lots of time and great deal of money to recruit and train new employees (Allen, Weeks, &
Moffitt, 2005). In order to prevent these from happening, maintaining the turnover rate at a certain level (it is impossible to totally eliminate turnover in an organization)
and replace the poor performers. For the purpose of keeping the talents in the companies, the employers have to understand their employees. Knowing what the employees want and what they valued most toward jobs is indeed crucial, especially today in a world where companies have to take proactive measures to find and retain talents. Hence, this research intends to utilize career anchors to discover how differently employees prioritize their personal needs regarding their career choices (Schein & Maanen, 2016).
Career anchors developed by Schein (1978) are the tools used to facilitate talent management. It helps identify an individual’s internal factor that he/she will never give up even when making difficult career decisions. It is an individual’s self-image which is developed through their personality, skills, abilities, talents and past experiences. However, individuals may not know what their career anchors are without actually doing the job. It takes some time to accumulate experiences and learn in the early years of their career life. Once an individual’s anchor is formed, he/she will use it as guidance to their career path. However, from other studies, researchers proposed that individuals do not only have one career anchor that influences career decision making process (Suutari & Taka, 2004; Chapman &
Brown, 2014); rather, multiple anchors working at the same time as the dominant anchors is the more common phenomenon in individuals’ career.
Therefore, this research intended to discover how employees in Taiwan react when they encountered career plateau, especially their intention to leave the organization. Meanwhile, using career anchors to identify how individuals’ personal preferences affect the career decisions they have to make.
Statement of the Problem
From past studies, the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention have been widely studied (Chao, 1990; Milliman, 1992) and the investigation of factors in between has been focused on the variables such as organizational/supervisor supports (Wickramasinghe & Jayaweera, 2010) and mentoring (Foster, Shastri, & Withane, 2011). These research mostly focus on contextual factors that affect individuals’ career decisions or behaviors; however, few studies focus on individuals’ inner factors such as personality and individual career-career oriented variables that greatly influence how they make choices regarding their career (Ettington, 1998; Wen & Liu, 2015).
In addition, nowadays in the private sector in Taiwan, many companies conduct all sort of personality tests when recruiting employees to make sure that the candidates have either person-job fit or person-organization fit. However, companies only apply the tests to the new employees when entering the company. Not many companies utilize the tools and examine their workers regularly to see whether their personal traits, preferences, priorities, and state of mind have changed over time, especially in SMEs where talent management are usually not well-structured or even ignored.
When employees are plateaued, they might face some career decisions. Career anchors then play an important role in the decision-making process. With the career anchors, employees will have a better guidance toward their future career, while the employers will be able to know what the employees valued most, how the employees feel about being plateaued. In this case, the employers might be able to predict employees’ possible reactions (stay, turnover or else) so as to take appropriate measures to minimize the effect of career plateau on turnover.
1978) that every individual have only one dominant anchor that plays as the most important personal factor when dealing with career decisions, many researchers found that individuals may have multiple dominant anchors at the same time (Erwee, 1990; Coetzee & Schreuder, 2014). Therefore, in this research, the researcher proposed that the eight career anchors to an individual is more an idea of different profile patterns and each anchor has different level of influence rather than a choice of the most important one.
Purpose of the Study
There are two purposes in this study. First, this study aims to discover the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention in Taiwan. The researcher wants to discover what relationship it is in such an extreme industry structure (over 97% of companies are SMEs). Second, the researcher intends to explore the existence of career anchor profiles and their differential level of the effects on the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention.
Thus, the researcher hoped to investigate the general profile patterns of employees in Taiwan and understood the general reactions to turnover intention of plateaued employees with different career anchor profiles. It was expected to facilitate human resource management and talent development within companies.
Research Questions
From the problem statement and the purpose of this study, the research questions derived are as follow:
1. In Taiwan, how does career plateau affect an individual’s turnover intention?
2. How will different career anchor profiles influence the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention?
Scope of the Study
This study focuses on the relationship between career plateau and turnover intention in Taiwan. Career anchor profiles are used as the moderators to see the effects on such relationship. Some other important variables that might affect employees’ turnover intention are not discussed in this research. In addition, other consequences of career plateau are not included in the study as well. Due to time and budget constraint, the participants of this research are Taiwan employees who have been working for more than one year. The research questionnaires are distributed online and the size of the sample is around 400; therefore, the results of this study might not be able to generalize to the entire country or all industries.
Definition of the Terms Career Plateau
In this study, the researcher adopted the definition from Bardwick (1986) that there are two different forms of career plateau: hierarchical plateau and job content plateau. Hierarchical plateauing happens when employees have little mobility among the organization ranks. As to job content plateau, it occurs when individuals are not able to receive new tasks or challenges in an organization.
Turnover Intention
Turnover intention was defined by Mobley (1977) as an employee’s intention to permanently leave the organization voluntarily
Career Anchors
Career anchors include an individual’s past experiences, talents, values and attitudes which provide stability and guidance to a person’s career. It can either be the ‘motivator’ or ‘driver’ of the individual. A career anchor is the self-image element that people will not give up, even when facing difficult career decisions (Schein, 1978).